College football’s championship weekend features the last Saturday of the calendar year, when you can sweat pigskin bets from noon to midnight ET. No matter how your season’s gone, you’re going to miss the adrenaline rush.
The action actually begins Friday night, with the American, Conference USA and Mountain West titles up for grabs, followed by the ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, MAC, SEC, Sun Belt and SWAC games on a busy, busy Saturday.
Are you ready?
“The point spreads are close and there are great storylines and intriguing matchups,” Westgate SuperBook vice president of race and sports John Murray told FOX Sports. “Conference realignment created fresh matchups like Oregon–Penn State, Georgia–Texas and Arizona State–Iowa State. We’ve never seen these teams play for conference championships.
“It’s not the same old games we always see.”
Murray acknowledged that conference weekend is more unique than most college football weekends due to liabilities in futures markets. The SuperBook is one of many shops around Las Vegas that’ll be rooting for Ashton Jeanty and the Boise State Broncos to lose outright to the hometown UNLV Rebels.
Conventional wisdom would tell you Vegas sportsbooks would be overwhelmed with future bets on the Rebels, but that is not the case. There were a handful of Boise bets before the season and the Broncos’ three-point loss at Oregon in early September created a financial snowball.
“If you took away our futures liabilities, I would really be looking forward to this weekend,” Murray said. “It becomes difficult to book some games the way you want to. We have a massive liability on Boise State right now.
“We don’t have any liabilities on the Big Ten game, so we can book it as a regular game. We saw sharp money on Penn State at +3.5. There’s also sharp money on Clemson. I’m not sure how good Clemson is, but playing Georgia and South Carolina outside the conference is pretty tough.
“Georgia +3 is for sure a sharp side, too.”
WynnBET senior trader Motoi Pearson echoed Murray’s sentiments in the Mountain West. An outright win for the “home team” would be massive.
“We need Boise to fall,” Pearson said. “It’s our only real pain.”
CFB Week 15 Best Bets: Georgia vs. Texas, Clemson vs. SMU
Elsewhere, Golden Nugget executive sportsbook director Tony Miller has been writing money hand over fist on the Texas Longhorns to handle the Georgia Bulldogs in Saturday’s SEC Championship Game in Atlanta.
“It’s the first day of the rodeo,” Miller cracked. “They’re coming in with their cowboy hats and boots, and they’re all betting me Texas. They’re firing.
“I’ll definitely be rooting for Georgia. We’re a Texas house over here. They laid us all the way up to Texas -3, and they’re still laying the 3. That’s the biggest decision for Saturday as of right now. Other than that, I got a little more action on SMU and I expect Oregon money on the late game, but we’ll see.”
Miller doesn’t mind needing Kirby Smart to deliver.
“How often do you get to root for Georgia? I’m okay with it.”
The MAC and Sun Belt games aren’t drawing much interest because they’re buried in the deck among the marquee matchups. Miami Ohio–Ohio goes heads up with Arizona State-Iowa State and Lafayette-Marshall is sharing bandwidth with Clemson-SMU and Oregon-Penn State.
“People mostly use the favorites from small conferences in parlays. They’re using Miami and Lafayette. I’m not writing much on the games themselves. It would be nice to get Ohio or Marshall outright.”
Either way, Miller, Murray and Pearson are all singing the same tune: down with Boise.
“It’s not a big problem, but we’ll lose a good amount on Boise,” Miller said. The only Boise thing that’ll save the day is if Ashton Jeanty wins the Heisman, so cross your fingers for that. I’ll get absolutely crushed on Travis Hunter.”
Sam Panayotovich is a sports betting analyst for FOX Sports and BetQL Network. He previously worked for WGN Radio, NBC Sports and VSiN. Follow him on Twitter @spshoot.
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